I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

She blinded me with science

This post has the potential to be contentious. Ah well. As the poet said, if you're not being criticized, you may not be doing much.

In my previous post, I talked very briefly about the need to always keep learning about EVE mechanics, which is mostly not a bad thing. Learning is always good, et cetera. But it does sometimes create unintended consequences, which when they are good CCP labels as "emergent game play" and when they are bad generally escalate into "EVE players are dumb" situations.

Much of this simultaneously comes from the fact of -- and can be avoided through submitting to -- the "science" of EVE. Very little about this game, after all, is art. In many ways, there are definite right and wrong ways to do things: much of EVE Online can be plotted on flow charts. There is a science to fitting a ship, and a science to flying it. There is a science to where this ship fits within a fleet, how that snippet of a fleet fits within a doctrine, and how that doctrine fits within a large multi-fleet armada common to sov warfare. There is a science to capturing a territory within either faction warfare or sovereignty warfare, and a science to defending it, and a science to how to conduct high-sec war declarations including short-cuts specific to all three kinds of play that experts will know how to use and novices will not.(1)

There is, in short, a science to everything in EVE.

And when players know how to use these things, we say they are "good at EVE" or "smart" and when players don't know how to use these things, we say the opposite, including labeling them as "dumb" when the correct word is ignorant. It's not that that they're inherently stupid (usually), it's simply that they are uneducated. The day they learn something new, the clock I talked about in the previous post resets and hopefully they won't make that mistake again. Certainly, there are people in this game that insist on making the same mistakes over and over. But contrary to popular belief, many EVE players are actually pretty smart and if you explain the science of how something works to them, they'll get it and they'll follow it.

It's just that in real-life science, things are documented. In EVE, the science of how to do complicated things are jealously guarded secrets used by the initiated against those who are not.

"You can affect something big, even if you're small," the old Goon propaganda poster promises. What it doesn't tell you is that the knife cuts both ways. If you don't understand the ship fitting or how to fly it, you will probably lose the ship. If you don't understand how the fit works within a fleet or the fleet doctrine, you endanger the fleet and risk its destruction. If you don't understand how the doctrine fits within the armada, you threaten the armada. If you don't understand faction warfare mechanics or corp mechanics or sov mechanics... well, you potentially threaten the faction, the corp, or the alliance.

For every story of a hero newbie tackling a high value target, there's another story of a newbie whose name is mud who bubbled a friendly capital or super-capital... or got an alliance's wallet and assets stolen.

And when the newer player makes a mistake that affects something big, it's never the newer player that pays the price. The new player loses a dictor. It's the vets that trusted him that lose billions. Or hundreds of billions.

And when the newer player falls prey to the dark side of the science of EVE, we bitter-vets are always quick to throw out the "dumb" label: he was dumb to fly that ship, he was dumb to get into fleet without understanding what he was doing, he was dumb to mess with corp mechanics without understanding them, he was dumb to trust Scooter McCabe. And if all else fails, the bully's accusation comes out, that the vet was dumb to trust the new player.

But was he dumb? Or merely uneducated?

And then we bemoan how few content creators -- or "instigators" as CCP Seagull calls them -- there are in this game. With so much science to learn and understand, and with the slightest mistake being picked up on and exploited, it doesn't surprise me a single little bit that there are so few. Who wants to take that risk in such a risk averse game?

I suspect we lose a lot of EVE players and potential EVE players and a lot of potential content creators to the science of EVE.

(1) Examples: using SBUs to "blockade" your own space as a defensive measure, the old dec-shields used in high-sec, placing your ESS in a spot inaccessible to anything but a fleet, and other such tactics.

38 comments:

No. He was dumb to forget that, by design, EVE is out to bite off the hand that feeds it.

I wonder how many people has lost EVE to the outrageously high cost of information asymmetry. "I know the game and you don't, thus I kick you out of he game -and deprive CCP of a subscriber" is exactly how will end most of the "spike noobs" who won't make it through.

They don't know and EVE will bite their hands off as per the game working as intended.

Is there something wrong with it? I think "yes". But most will disagree...

This is the age of the internet. There is a vast repository of knowledge about the game available to anyone willing to look for it. I have no problem with those who choose to remain ignorant being taken for everything they're worth by those who educate themselves.

Hilarously, this is actually in the new player's favor. Can't begin the count the number of week old players who made a fortune scamming/ganking/etc because they knew game mechanics and the 6 year vet didn't.

A big part of being "not dumb" (i.e. smart) is the ability to recognize your own lack of knowledge, to realize that there are "unknown unknowns" (as Rumsfeld called them) and to behave accordingly.

In a few weeks I will sit in my own supercapital for the first time. I have been an EVE player for a long time and a capital pilot for a few years, I don't have any known unknowns when it comes to supercapitals - no instances of "I have heard this is a thing but I don't really know how it is supposed to work".

But you can bet that I will spend a lot of time trying to uncover hitherto unknown unknowns before taking the super for its first spin.

Because while I have no questions about how to use a super (I have turned all known unknowns I had into knowns long ago) and while I am naturally not aware of any specific unknown unknowns (otherwise they would be known unknowns) I have a very strong suspicion that there still are unknown unknowns I don't want to lose my ship to any of them.

Of course this process of searching for unknown unknowns is tedious as I can't really approach it in a systematic way. I will have to read through lots and lots of forum archives hoping to stumble across issues that I might have missed, I will have to listen what other super pilots have to say without being able to ask any specific questions of them, ...

But that's exactly the way I used to approach EVE when I was a new player: I spent my first ~2 months in EVE reading all the things in all the subforums.I spent much more time reading than playing during these first weeks but in return I managed to reduce the number of unknown unknowns very quickly by turning them into known unknowns ("I remember that someone mentioned in some forum post that accepting fleet invites in high-sec is risky. I have no idea if that guy was right and I don't know why it would be risky if it is - but I know this is something I have to look into before I ever accept a fleet invite.").

This attitude of being sensitive to the possibility of unknown unknowns is a huge part of "not being bad at EVE".

So you are suggesting that spending the 1st two months doing more reading than playing is an acceptable, even desired method, of starting out in Eve....yeah, the marketing people will love you.

I can see the ad's now: "Please read this 500 pages of reference material scattered across dozens of locations we won't tell you about, before undocking your ship. Oh, and BTW, you are paying for it was well."

Unfortunately, I fear your method is the correct method of surviving in Eve long term.

Bottom line, the NPE is terrible in Eve, from the huge amount of information that a player must know, to the cannibalistic behaviour of oh so many groups in the game when it comes to new players.

If CCP had ANY brains at all, they would take the money that they are wasting on some idiotic statue, and hire as many people as they can afford to populate the newbie channels, and lead these people through the basics of the game, lead them in fleets in danger free areas to get them to understand basic mechanics.

Here is a thought: Every Saturday and Sunday CCP runs, twice a day, at set times, a fleet, just for chars in the new channels. And the best part, CCP hands each of them a Polaris class ship, with no weapons. The noobs are given a guided tour of high sec, low sec, null sec. They learn some basic fleet commands and doctrines.

Best part: the ships are invulnerable. They can't kill someone, because of no weapons, but if they start griefing people in one, or leave the fleet, poof, ship gone.

Then, at the end of the tour, CCP mystically jumps the whole fleet to Jove space where their ships disappear (have them on a 4 hour suicide timer), and the noobs climb into t1 frigs provided for them, and they have a free-for-all, or they shoot sansha's as a team, or whatever.

It IS the correct method, just not you idiotic "...before undocking...". I came into the game, undocked and did the tutorials n stuff... I was just very careful, when I saw something happen or anything that interested me, I noted and avoided it until later whne I was docked up, THEN I read up on :whatever: and then decided whether to get involved in "it" or not.

I had a lot of Ripard's 'resets', lost a few ships, a coulpe to bumbling into ship I din't know about and a few to trying :something: before erading up on it... but all in all I read as I played, learned on the fly as twere and had a ball.... I loved my noobhood actually, griefers and gankers an all.

As for CCP running fleets... have you ever seen them do that? The biggest (unintentional) awoxing in EvEs history were CCP lead fleets... I fear far more noobs would permaragequit if led to the null Schlachthofs by CCP devs than any amount of normal griefing would drive out...

The rest of your idea's haev about as much merit... except... "...just direct every new player to Eve University on day one. now THAT is actually worth considering.

Aura could (std MMO quide style) order the new Empyrean recruits to "Immediately go to EvE Uni (or Agony Unleashed or Brave Newbies) to begin the next level of your training." That's really not bad... sell EU (AU & BN) as Player Based Advanced Training. Give the little nubbins (1) immediate immersion into the social game, (2) corp experience, (3) fleet experience and most importantly, some level of the (4) protection in numbers that all the above gives you as compared to undocking and blundering into a lowsec gate camp all on your own...

This is why a lot of people say the first rule of EVE is 'assume all ships explode when undocking' (or 'if you love it, let it go'). That way, when Nubcakes McN00b didn't know how aggression mechanics worked, got killed and left the fleet without a scout and you all died in a fire: you don't mind. The ship was already dead.

My lot try to take on new players as often as we can, and one thing we repeat is "in EVE, XP is earned from your own lossmails." Every fuckup is a learning opportunity, and there's so much to learn that learning things before they kill you is unusual.

That said, we don't do huge fleets, we're just a smallish w-space outfit. We try to teach people enough about huge fleets that if they do decide they want to go to Null, they can, but our MaximumAvailableDerp is much lower than it would be in a 'proper' nullsec fleet. Maybe that helps!

Ripard, that last sentence should read 'we lose a lot of potential subscribers to the complexity of EVE'. Very true and... who cares?

You might as well say 'we lose a lot of potential subscribers who hate spaceships'. Again, very true. Should CCP add some new space and fill it with furry pandas? k-space, w-space and fp-space, sounds fun!

Seriously, you're not discussing some specific mechanic like drone assist or jump drive force projection here. You're questioning complexity, which is one of EVE's core features! One of the things that literally defines EVE.

The point is, if you like complexity (and spaceships, and a harsh universe, and lasting consequences etc. etc.) you play EVE. You become an EVE player. And later you certainly don't go and quit EVE because of the very reason you love it, for god's sake!

On the other hand, if you don't love that kind of stuff, you go play something else. And everybody's happy.

Ripard, please explain why do you think we should change some core feature of this great game in order to cater to the tastes of people that currently don't enjoy EVE. Seriously, what's the point?

Do you think 'more subscribers is always better'? Angry Birds has 2 BILLION downloads, does that make it the best game in the world?

And please don't say CCP is in desperate need of more subscribers else they'll shut down the servers. Last time I checked (data is public on ccpgames.com) the company is quite profitable (good for them!).

I'm not sure Ripard meant to argue to change core features of the game itself; I read his post more as argument for a change in attitude: less "L2P" and "GB2WoW", more "This is how you should have done it".

This guy gets what a "niche" game is. We can't hope to bring in everybody, and attempting to do so will end up driving everyone, new and old, away disenfranchised.

IMO, most MMO players out there don't get the MASSIVE part very well because they've been ruined by games that might have physically massive worlds, but not massive meta, or massive community, or massive engagement on a personal level, or massive depth, or loss, or anything that really makes a sandbox MMO truly massive.

I think we, as a community, will decide whether we grow or not by being inclusive and engaging to the newbies we do get. By easing them into our way of thinking, not by making things more simple for them. The reason EVE's learning cliff is so difficult is because people trying to climb it don't usually have a veteran climber belaying for them.

The question isn't whether we could get more players or subscribers by dumbing down EVE-- the question is whether we could keep more players or subscribers by getting rid of wonky, strange mechanics that provide a significant competitive advantage, to the point of -feeling- like an exploit even when it isn't.

Think how many times someone's gone 'working as intended' for something that feels flat broken, exploit-y, or weird-- like using MTUs to gank semi-AFK, safety-green mission runners without CONCORD intervention.

But they all miss the point. Ripard's vision and yours are simply based on different ideas about what EVE should look like.You summed yours up: harsh, lasting consequences, complex, and what it's like now (based on your hostility to changing core features in response to current non-players).

Ripard's blog post asks the question: is the complexity delivering value? It's supposed to be the basis of emergent gameplay, but it has costs in that it punishes beginners, is largely ad hoc and unorganized, and it has a maintenance overhead for CCP in terms of bugs and interfaces.

Blizzard has been tackling this problem for a couple of years now, stripping complexity out of character attributes, abilities, and encounters. And what they've belatedly come to understand is that it's really hard to tell complexity that just bogs things down from complexity that adds gameplay, enjoyment, and the possibilities of emergent behaviour.

An extended example:Did you know that, if you anchor a SBU, anyone can online it for their corp and alliance, even not the people who anchored it?Did you know that if you give it a player PVP timer, even while onlining, only people in the corp that shot it can online it until the timer runs out?Did you know that warp disruptors and guns give PVP timers, but target painters don't?

You can do a lot to mess up someone's attempt to siege a system if you know those things and they don't. This isn't documented anywhere, although it's lore among a certain level of sovwarrior. When you're desperately trying to stave off assault by a superior but TZ-locked force, it can be the difference between winning (for now) and losing.

Actually, pretty much all of the mechanics and so-called "science" of EVE are public knowledge. They merely require a bit of effort to find. A tiny bit of effort that stops at entering a search query into Google. Only idiots and lazy asshats who are used to being spoon-fed shit have trouble finding information on everything in EVE, including esoteric and idiosyncratic mechanics that are used by only a few dozen people.

The problem is the science plus the ruthlessness. For instance, I spent last weekend in TESO, and the game has more complexity to it than I've previously seen in a fantasy MMO. Not EVE-level complexity, but some. I spent a fair amount of time experimenting, poking around, and otherwise trying to get a handle on it. Fine. The difference is that there was essentially no cost to it except for my own time.

Is that more newbie-friendly? There's a case to be made for that, sure. Is it EVE? More to the point, is i worth managing it? For instance, it's one thing to spend a long time reading up on ways to keep your supercapital alive, because at that point you're not new, and you presumably know the game fairly well, and you presumably have an incentive to take steps to preserve a significant investment that everyone will want to destroy on sight. But if you're new? Two months of reading is just the learning skills all over again, except that instead of the capsuleer doing the reading, the player is, and instead of acquiring a small number of in-game skill books, the player has to find all the documentation himself, and filter out the good advice from the bad despite a near-complete lack of the knowledge necessary to build a good filter in the first place.

If you'll indulge my riding a personal hobby-horse for a sentence, a large part of the problem is that the way the default new-player area is set up is conducive to the greatest number of the most obscure exploits--and the mechanism to bypass most of those, the war dec, is a particularly galling combination of toothless and merciless, insofar as it essentially introduces brand-new players to a space even more lawless than low sec, while protecting the war deccer's assets and money-making characters safely behind CONCORD. How to change that without saddling EVE with a Trammel-like straitjacket--which, just to be absolutely clear, is something that I never want to see happen--is a hard problem.

I think the biggest thing that needs to change for new players is to tell them exactly why it's important to get into a player corporation as soon as possible! I've had 6 month old players join my corp that were so much farther behind the learning curve than my 1 month old newbie just because my newb had access to corp chat and all the advice contained therein without worrying about NPC corp trolls and misinformation (i.e. no one has ever linked "jita major trade hub" in my corp chat that actually linked Rancer). So many new players just don't know what a player corp can do for them, and even worse soo many completely ignore chat and the whole social aspect of EVE!

Never heard that saying by Swanson (don't know where you got 'poet' from, he was CEO of a giant military contractor). The way I heard it was from a bigshot lawyer in New York, who told me, "If you're not being sued then you're nobody".

CCP is in desperate need of more subscribers. Unfortunately, one of the tenets of hyper-capitalism is that it's not enough to be profitable. A company that makes USD 1.000.000 profit year after year is considered a failure. Why? Because if your profits are not increasing every year then your company sucks. Sad, but that's the way of Wall Street for the last few decades.

And finally, while their impact is probably not that big, I have come across more than a few people who are outright ignorant about certain aspects of Eve and they SPREAD their ignorance to new players whenever given the chance. I can't count the number of times per month when I have to correct someone about some shit they just spewed out that is not true. For those who don't know any better such bad advice actively makes them MORE ignorant because they think they know how something works now and must be un-convinced of its truth before they're willing to consider alternatives. There are a LOT of ignorant people in game spreading their ignorance around. The Incursion communities seem to have more than their fair share of them (not in the 'elite' communities, however; no matter how much they get bashed for being elitist, they know their shit cold).

Players and good game design wants depth, not complexity, and complexity is a poor substitute. We've been lucky, in that there is some depth, due to the completely insane amount of options out there, and the poor ancient code, but it's not ideal by any standards.

Chess isn't a good game because you have 54 pieces, that can move in 24 different ways, it's a simple to learn, hard to master system. Eve should be like that. A POS that takes 3 research papers to be able to say you have secured it properly isn't a game of depth, it's poor game designed, mirred in complexity.

Honestly, the move to get rid of all the stupid clickfests, and random knowledge about obscure methods doesn't hurt the game, it helps it. And our way of measuring that is by how long it take a new player to understand them.

I really hate the 'HTFU' and learning curve argument. It's just ego. And if we want Eve to matter in a few years, it's going to take new players. New players don't want to get blown up, and not even understand what happened. They want to lose because there is a skill that they are lacking, or a technique that someone was better at. Not because you didn't know about an obscure technique that gets you around a very simple mechanic.

Everyone has this 'cater' idea, that somehow you are dumbing down the game. It makes no sense anywhere else in the world. Why have an automatic transmission? You are only dumbing down those of us who can operate a standard, crack car. Why program in C++? Everyone should be able to use assembly. Why have blogger around for making your blog? Everyone should know how to create HTML on their own...

Eve needs to be easy to understand, and hard to master. That's depth, thats engaging play, everything else is Ego and short sightedness. POS should be drag and drop, SOV should be a straightforward process. FW shouldn't take more than a 5 minute 'training level' to understand how it works.

The content is built from the depth. Sure, we got huge battles because a tickbox also needed an 'apply' button. We also got it because a group decided to make it their Alamo.

My alliance had been wardecced by the one-hour-old corp of a one-hour-old alt. Noone else was in the corp, and noone else had joined it in the six days since the wardec went active. I had the alt on watch list, checked to make sure that noone else was in the corp, and undocked, thinking I was safe. After all, nothing could happen without the alt popping up on my watchlist, right?

Five jumps down the line, the guy whose alt it was caught up with me, accepted an invite to the corp while I was already locked in a warp tunnel, undocked and beat my slow-ass freighter to a gate-- nuking it without CONCORD intervention, and with no risk to himself at all. In fact, once he had me tackled, he accepted an invite with another alt so that he could have someone else on the other side of the gate for when I slowboated away and tried to use gate mechanics to escape. They dropped corp an hour later, and odds are biomassed the alt once the wardec ended.

I petitioned, and CCP went 'vOv' and 'working as intended' and 'we're sorry for your loss, but those are totally legitimate mechanics.'

I was-- and still am-- very close to dropping my subs because of this sort of thing.

Have you escalated the petition? If not, remember to always escalate every petition up as many levels as you can. The GMs who do the initial petition responses are generally good folk, but they don't always know all of the rules and game mechanics and have an inclination to reject petitions off-hand rather than ask for advice from more-senior staff.

That said, warping around in a freighter while under wardec is generally a terrible idea no matter how safe you think you may be, unless you're prepared to lose that freighter. If anything, the basic premise of EVE is that you can and probably will lose every ship you will ever own at some point.

It was rejected by a senior GM; I was pretty sure I couldn't go any higher, so closed it. I may reopen it, though, if that's what you'd advise: going higher than a senior GM.

And your second section is basically what Jester's talking about here: the 'you're dumb' or 'you should've known better' or 'htfu' school of response. You're saying it a lot more politely, but I definitely got a lot of grief from my alliance over a JF loss. But how was I to know that an empty JF would get nuked, when I had the only member of the wardec corp on watch list, knew he was the only member as of the moment I undocked, but not that watchlisting the only (perceived, evidently) threat wasn't going to be adequate warning? I thought: "well, there are weird mechanics in EVE, but they can't be used without the wardec character on, right? So I'm safe, or I'll be alerted when I'm no longer safe." Ignorance is what killed the JF-- mine, admittedly. But is this complexity or mechanical oddity that improves the EVE experience? Is the ability for people to use a one-day-old alt for essentially risk-free wardec ambushes a gameplay mechanism that improves the quality of EVE play?

I'd say no. In fact, I'd say it's very close to something CCP ruled was an exploit in 2008-- https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Exploit_notifications#Insta-Joining_Corporations_to_surprise_wartargets

But a senior GM disagreed, and said that it wasn't an exploit because A) the attacker joined the corp in a station, even though it was after I entered the warp tunnel, and B) ships warping slowly is a game mechanic.

Jester’s Trek, 2/19/14:“I've talked to hundreds of players about the impetus that first got them to start playing EVE Online and many times, it comes down to some catalyst: the Guiding Hand Social Club theft, the disbanding of Band of Brothers, a particular patch or feature. For those of us who started playing EVE this way (and I am among them), we can all remember that catalyst.”

For someone who lists two *massive* heists as the impetus behind hundreds of players (yourself included) for playing this game, you seem strangely uncomfortable with scamming.

Those people that some call dumb are actualy content creators.Example a misclick wich is usualy an inocent mistake caused asakai.Like the chaos theory trailer a lot of content is caused by mistakes and unforseen events.A misfit ship can be the most usefull ship in the right situation .Personaly i think we should call them hero's.Everyone should know who the hero of asakai, Hed, ... is. Even smaller events like wormhole evictions.Things blowing up stuff creates content in eve!

Honest, it sadly difficult to remember how it was when I was a noob at Eve.At the same time, I can relate since I'm still noob in many aspect of it.

The solution to improve the dissemination of science amongst the science-less should be quite straightforward:Provide automated teaching experiences.

There is already a bunch of tutorial missions that shows the new player how to handle basic ship controls and skill management.

How about adding to the game a couple of instanced, story-driven simulations that would introduce the players to the various advanced concepts?

Here how it goes:Noob pick his last tutorial mission and gets forwarded to an 'advanced training' agent.That agent gives him missions that sends him to deadspace spots that requires a key to access the gate (which is provided only to him),Inside that space, he is required to switch to another ship that he will use to activate the various 'events' in a simulation that recreates some historical event from EVE lore.His own contribution to the scenario that unfolds in front of him depends on what bit of science you want to introduce him to.By the time he's finished with the scenario, he has to get back in his ship to leave.

He finally gets back home with tidbits of knowledge that will prevent him from getting involved in stuff he has no business in because he has been warned there is a lot to learn before getting there.

You can get as much science as you want available in the agent missions and it's truly up to the new player to go through it all if he wants.

That would feed the learning curve in the new player brain through game play instead of traditional internet/forum digging.

My only problem in this area in concerns to new players is a bit different. It's not that we drive people away with our attitude so much as we forget what Eve was when we started.

One of the problems with Eve is each expansion isn't a vertical power progression, it's a horizontal addition of mechanics that effect the entire game. Bombers, Heavy Interdictors, Jump Freighters, Orcas, BlackOps, Marauders, Tech3, EW Frigates, Rorquels, Teir 3 Battlecruisers, and the Venture... none of them existed. Just in ships that's a lot!!

That's a lot of content I got to learn as it dribbled in expansion to expansion over the years. Eve gets harder to begin the later you start because every expansion brings more you HAVE to learn. And that's only ever going to get worse. At the same time, I don't think most of us bitter vets appreciate how easy we've had it in learning the game compared to what a newbie starting out today has.

I tell all my interested friends (which are very few) that more than anything, Eve is a game of information. That if they only want to log in and kinda let the game come to them, they are going to perform poorly and be surprised by many things. And that does turn some people off. But that's just one of the ways Eve is different.-Bantara

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